info@a-albionic.com
 
A-albionic Research, PO Box 20273, Ferndale, MI 48220-0273

A-albionic Research is an authorized distributor of NameBase $79.00 Postpaid

From NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993:
 

     Anyone who follows today's academic debates on multiculturalism, and by happenstance is also familiar with the power-structure research that engaged students in the sixties and early seventies, is struck by that old truism: the only thing history teaches us is that no one learns from
history. By now it's even embarrassing, perhaps because of our soundbite culture. Not only must each generation painstakingly relearn, by trial and error, everything learned by the previous generation, but it's beginning to appear that we have to relearn ourselves that which we knew a scant twenty years earlier. The debate over diversity is one example of this.

     Researchers in the sixties discovered that the ruling elites of the West mastered the techniques of multiculturalism at the onset of the Cold War, and employed them time and again to counter the perceived threat from communism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was funded first by the CIA and then, after this was exposed in 1967, by the Ford Foundation. CCF created magazines, published books, and conducted conferences throughout the world, in an effort to wean intellectuals to democratic liberalism.[1]

     The CIA was also busy in Africa. In an article titled "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer" that first appeared in 1969 in Ramparts and was reprinted in the Black Panther newspaper and elsewhere, members from the Africa Research Group presented convincing evidence that "the CIA has promoted black cultural nationalism to reinforce neo-colonialism in
Africa." In their introduction they added that "activists in the black colony within the United States can easily see the relevance to their own situation; in many cases the same techniques and occasionally the same individuals are used to control the political implications of Afro - American culture."[2]

     But this is lost history, found today only on dusty library shelves or buried in obscure databases. None of it is mentioned in the current debate over diversity, not even in one of the most lucid essays, an opinion piece by David Rieff that appeared in a recent Harper's.[3] Rieff
paints a picture of multiculturalism and shows, in broad strokes, how multiculturalism serves capitalism. To appreciate the significance of multiculturalism we must, as Rieff does, look at the academic arguments from someplace in the real world, or at least from off campus. But we must also be aware of our own historical legacy: psychological warfare and the secret state, the mass media and the culture of spectacle, the role of foundations, and above all, the interests and techniques of the elite globalists who won the Cold War.

     From the time that this war began in 1947, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, in cooperation with the CIA, began funding programs at major U.S. universities such as  Harvard, MIT, and Columbia. They began with an emphasis on Russian studies, but by the mid-1960s these three foundations and the CIA had a near-monopoly on all international studies in the U.S.[4] This phenomenon, a big-money, top-down affair born out of strategic considerations, is the precursor of today's academic multiculturalism.

     Some defenders of academic diversity pretend that the elitist shoe is on the other foot, and note that their critics are funded by certain conservative foundations. Sara Diamond tracks the Olin Foundation and Smith-Richardson money behind Dinesh D'Souza and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), two of the more vocal critics of multiculturalism.[5] Diamond points out that the Smith-Richardson Foundation has its own CIAconnections, even though they pale in significance alongside the Carnegie - Ford - Rockefeller nexus. But Diamond's major error is in framing her arguments in terms of right and left. This allows the real dynamics to
escape her field of vision.

     The ruling elite that finds diversity useful is an elite operating at a level which transcends right and left. While there is an ideological right that is battling the left, and while they do enjoy funding from other conservatives, these folks are not the problem because they do not have substantial power. Nothing shows this better than the fact that this ideological right has always been as concerned as the left over the real source of power, the elite globalists. This began with the Reece Committee on the role of foundations in 1954, continued through the 1960s with the
John Birch Society's attacks on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and later on the Trilateral Commission, and continues today with Pat Robertson,[6] Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Spotlight, and others. It's not a right-left problem, but rather a top-bottom problem.[7]

     Secondly, whatever the funding enjoyed by D'Souza and NAS, one must recognize that the ideological right has long been motivated by a Constitutionally-based, protectionist patriotism that hates big government. Too often the patriotic component has devolved into what can only be described as racism and imperialism. But in 1993 they are once again isolationist, at a time when louder mainstream voices want to assume the role of the world's policeman. And today the populist, ideological right (as opposed to the corporate, Republican, elitist right found on the CFR roster) is also opposed to NAFTA, every bit as firmly as the trade-union Democrats. The ideological right, in other words, takes ideas seriously -- a characteristic of those who lack power. It's just possible that diversity for its own sake deserves to be criticized because it
replaces the search for truth with a situationist relativism based on personal experience. This too is a consideration that defies simplistic left-right categories.

     For those who feel that the forces behind the debate are instructive, it's worthwhile noting that the Ford Foundation began supporting feminist groups and women's studies programs in the early 1970s. Just ten years earlier they were busy training Indonesian elites (using Berkeley
professors as instructors) to take over from Sukarno,[8] which occurred soon after a CIA - sponsored coup in 1965 that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Did the folks at Ford Foundation have a bleeding change of heart, or are they continuing the same battle on another front? It would appear to be the latter. David R. Hunter, considered the "godfather of progressive philanthropy" by hip heirs such as George Pillsbury,[9] began his new career co-opting the next generation after spending four years at the Ford Foundation.[10] The ruling elite knows exactly what it's doing, and they are remarkably consistent.

     When Ramparts blew the whistle on the CIA's domestic cultural activities in 1967, President Johnson appointed a committee consisting of elitists Nicholas Katzenbach (Rhodes scholar and former Ford Foundation fellow), OSS old-boy John Gardner (Carnegie Corporation president,
1955-1965), and CIA director Richard Helms to study the problem. The Katzenbach Committee reported that they expected private foundations, which had grown from 2,200 in 1955 to 18,000 in 1967, to take over the CIA's funding of international organizations, and recommended a
"public-private mechanism" to give grants openly. Sixteen years later a Democratic Congress adopted this recommendation by establishing the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). By now it requires a leap of good faith to draw distinctions among complicated overlapping networks of CIA funding, NED funding, and funding by foundations such as Carnegie, Ford,
and Rockefeller. The same people are behind all three, and they seem to be getting richer every day. They promote the two-party system because it keeps the rest of us off track.

     Consider the issue of women in the workplace. Everyone agrees that increased opportunities for women are wonderful, but what effect has this had on family income? Here's the sobering answer, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, no less:
 

    " The average weekly take home pay of a worker who entered the workforce in 1989 is $5.68 less today than thirty years ago. This is also reflected in hourly wages. Compared to 1959, there has been a slight increase, 60 cents an hour. But hourly wages are down from their peak in 1973. The 1950s were our boom time. In that one decadehourly wages grew by 83 cents. It took the following three decades to add a mere 60 cents. Families made do by doubling up in the workforce. Between 1955 and 1989 female participation in the work force rose from 35.7 percent to 57.4 percent. Even so, family income stayed flat. Median family income in 1973 was $32,109. Half a generation later in 1988 it was, in constant 1988 dollars, $32,191, a gain of $82. We also started the 1980s as the largest creditor nation in history. We are now the largest debtor.... As a debtor nation, we must expect that the people we owe money to will be better off than we are.[11]

     More American women are working just to keep the family going, while more Japanese women can afford to stay home and are choosing to do so. The flip side of increased opportunities for American women is that they can no longer choose to stay out of the labor force. As David Rieff asks, "If multiculturalism is what its proponents claim it is, why has its moment seen the richest one percent of Americans grow richer and the deunionization of the American workplace? There is something wrong  with this picture."[12]

     Consider, too, the situation of African-Americans. As soon as the ghettos erupted in the mid-1960s, Johnson's war on poverty began pouring funds on the flames. This was followed with Nixon's "black capitalism," and by the early 1970s affirmative action was institutionalized by edict from above in both the public sector and in major private corporations that held government contracts. But twenty years later only the politicians, pundits, and movie stars pretend that any of this is significant; it's the Jesse Jacksons and black personalities on television who justify what they've got by emphasizing how far we've come thanks to the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile the young in the ghettos, and increasingly even on campuses, know that these front-office PR slots were filled long ago. It's not a problem of inequality; for the next generation there's already a rough equality in anticipated misery. The big problem is that opportunities are vanishing altogether, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation.

     What's left of the left has yet to even acknowledge this, which makes the proponents of diversity seem irrelevant and even a bit suspicious. It's as if the multiculturalists are protesting too much. Trapped by the cognitive dissonance engendered by hard evidence and common sense, their words lash out reactively in an effort to justify themselves. What else can they do? As David Rieff notes, their relationship to the real world is peripheral:
 

      "For all their writings on power, hegemony, and oppression, the campus multiculturalists seem indifferent to the question of where they fit  into the material scheme of things. Perhaps it's tenure, with its way of shielding the senior staff from the rigors of someone else's  bottom-line thinking. Working for an institution in which neither pay nor promotion is connected to performance, job security is guaranteed (after tenure is attained), and pension arrangements are probably the finest in any industry in the country -- no wonder a poststructuralist can easily believe that words are deeds. She or he can afford to.[13]"

     While self-justification may motivate tenured multiculturalists, the same politics also work well for those who are trying to get there. As any humanities grad student soon discovers, academia is about specialization, not about teaching. You need a gimmick. The choreography of the canon limits the varieties of mental gymnastics during any given academic period (about ten years), and anyone out of sync is destined for unemployment. By insisting on diversity as a challenge to the canon, new slots are forced open for tenure-track spin doctors. Pressure from the administration for departmental affirmative action dovetails nicely with the fact that only
victims can preach this new canon; presto, tenure at last! Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who resigned as chair of Emory's women's studies program because of complaints she wasn't sufficiently radical, admits as much:
 

     In real terms, however, the battle over multiculturalism is a battle over scarce resources and shrinking opportunities. To recognize this much does not deny the related battle over national identity, but does caution us to take the more extreme pronouncements pro and con with a grain of salt.[14]

     Multiculturalism can be an ideology that is used to bludgeon one's way into tenure, because affirmative action alone is insufficient. The essence of affirmative action becomes clear after leaving grad school and spending fifteen years working for small companies as well as several
large corporations. Affirmative action (the PR phrase is "equal opportunity" and the accurate phrase is "preferential treatment") is a facade, affecting only the low-level and public-interface positions in large corporations. After instructing their human resource departments along federal guidelines, upper management stays the same, secure in the knowledge that the low-level hires will statistically offset the white males behind their closed office doors. Feminists call this the "glass ceiling."

     For young white males without exceptional advantages, it's closer to a glass floor. Math doesn't play language games: if you quota something in you also quota something out. Someone must pay for the sins of the elite. When the diversity-mongers target white males, at best they are almost half correct -- many (not all) older white males have enjoyed advantages. But then when they make someone pay, they are all wrong: it's always the young and innocent who bear the brunt of their policies. It would make as much sense for U.S. institutions to impose sanctions on young women today, simply because historically they have enjoyed exemption from the military
draft.

     The fact that affirmative action appeared so rapidly over twenty years ago, without opposition from entrenched interests, should have provided a clue. It may have been designed to defuse civil unrest, but this remedy was forced from above, not from below. In a poll commissioned by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which plans to organize minorities in support of traditional family values, only 36.6 percent of Hispanics, 37.6 percent of blacks, and 10 percent of whites agreed with the statement that "African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities should received special preference in hiring to make up for past inequalities."[15] Theagenda of victimology, defined by George Will as "the proliferation of groups nursing grievances and demanding entitlements,"[16] is not an agenda shared widely off campus.

     It appears that those who are most vocal in support of affirmative action are those, reasonably enough, who are most dependent on it to maintain their advantage. The ruling elite are experts at manipulating their own interests; they know how to divide and conquer, which is why they continue to rule. As inequality becomes increasingly obvious, those who are less equal begin to see society in terms of "us" and "them." The dominant culture shades this definition by using the mass media to emphasize our differences at every opportunity. Conventional wisdom
becomes articulated within narrow parameters, which is another way of saying that the questions offered for public debate are rigged.

     The objective is to define "us" and "them" in ways that do not threaten the established order. Today everyone can see that there is more Balkanization on campus, and more racism in society, than there was when affirmative action began over twenty years ago. And for twenty years now
one can hardly get through the day without being reminded that race is something that matters, from TV sitcoms all the way down to common application forms (it would have been unthinkable to ask about one's race on an application form in the 1960s). We are not fighting the system anymore, we're fighting each other.

     Multiculturalism fails to challenge the underlying assumption of all affirmative action rationales, namely that opportunities are scarce and there's not enough for everyone. There is much evidence to substantiate this, particularly as the U.S. tries to remain competitive in a new global economy. Perhaps we should take the global perspective seriously and hunker down for hard times. It's just poor business sense to build a factory in the U.S. if you can build it in Mexico (2000 have moved already). In 1983 the cost of an hour's labor time here was $12.26. The hourly savings for using foreign labor that year amounted to $10.81 in Mexico, $10.09 in Singapore, $6.06 in Japan, and $10.97 in Korea.[17]

     Perhaps America's only potential advantage is the technical lead we enjoy in certain areas. If we can play this card well, it might partially compensate for a declining industrial base. Here, too, affirmative action has it all backwards. A huge pool of talent -- the ones, incidentally, who have most of the skills needed in a society that wants to emphasize technical innovation, merit, and quality -- are underemployed and demoralized by affirmative action policies.

     Recent literacy tests by the Education Department, the most comprehensive in two decades, show that American adults aged 21 to 25 scored significantly lower than eight years ago, and that about 40 million American adults of all ages have difficulty reading a simple sentence. Men
outscored women in document and quantitative literacy, and white adults scored significantly higher than any of the other nine racial and ethnic groups surveyed.[18] Over half of all minorities admitted to college under affirmative action programs drop out before graduating; 30 percent before the end of their freshman year.[19] America does not have the time or resources to bring everyone up to the same level, so instead it appears to be "dumbing down" our culture by denying opportunities and challenges to our most capable young people. This attempt at social leveling is a poor second choice.

Continued...